


Deliverance

by sable_tyger (orphan_account)



Category: Bomb Girls
Genre: Abuse, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-11
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/sable_tyger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate Andrews remembers her father. <em>(Kate-centric, hinted Betty/Kate)</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Deliverance

She remembers being seven years old, barely. Sometimes her memories go soft and strange at the edges, like ink dissolving into icy water as if it had never been—so perhaps not quite like that, then, because even when her memories fade, the impression of them remains, molded into her very being like clay shaped and burned in the potter’s hot oven, the temperature so great that it burns everything else away. Her father’s fingerprints are imprinted on her skin, as if she were clay carelessly smoothed before being glazed; the imperfections beneath encased there forever, now.

Seven years old, young but not as young as she should have been. Her mother had been braiding flowers into her hair, whispering to her. _My beautiful little girl,_ she’d said, or maybe she hadn’t. _I love you so much, my darling._

And then—the heavy footsteps of her father on the hollowed empty floorboards. Her mother’s fingers slipped in the braids, trying to tug the flowers out, too late.

She remembers her ears ringing after her father slapped her, remembers the hot burn of her skin where his hand had struck her. Years later she will think, yes, that is how it started—there in that horrible oven, the temperature rising so as to bake everything that she was away—her father’s hand the potter’s, and what he lacked in artistry he made up for in persistence. 

_Remember your father, Marion,_ he’d said to her, his voice as cold as a steel knife between her ribs. _Remember your father,_ and she had never known who he meant— _which father,_ she’d ask in all earnestness, only to receive another slap to the face, so hard that her ears would ring for hours.

It worked, though.

She remembers her father.

+

She does not think of herself as Kate Andrews. In her thoughts, she is always and will forever be Marion, the syllables not as sharp or short as Kate, snappy and quick—this is slower, more contemplative, _hers_. She does not know who Kate Andrews is. Kate Andrews, who builds bombs that kill people; Kate Andrews, who has filtered cigarette smoke through her teeth and laughed as it burned the back of her throat; Kate Andrews, who sings with her heart and her lungs and her soul because there is no one there to tell her she shouldn’t; Kate Andrews, who lies and runs and takes her freedom where she can, whether it is allowed of her or not.

Most likely Kate Andrews would have not let her father treat her that way, Marion thinks.

Well, too bad she’s not actually Kate Andrews, then.

+

She hates baths, and so that’s why she always takes them. If she doesn’t, he wins.

The hardest part is climbing into the water, every time. She looks down at the tub, the water steaming slightly in the cold air of the boardinghouse—winter’s coming, all right, clear as day—and she’s standing naked with her arms around herself, holding tight. Her fingernails dig at the grooves of the scars on her back, and she counts them one-by-one as if their number might have changed since the last time she examined them; sometimes she suspects they multiply. She drags her fingertips over the rough lines—whoever thinks that scars are smooth and white and soft, heroic symbols of what you’ve overcome to reach this point—they know nothing. Scars are rough and blood-red and sometimes bruise-purple, and they are never, ever soft, not even when the years change them, fade them, erase them over time; they will always be there, beneath the fabric of her skin, as new and dark as the day he made them.

They keep her up at night, sometimes, they itch so terribly. At other times they ache a phantom, transcendent ache that comes and goes like the pull of the tide. In, out, washing the sandy beach away to the sea.

She’s shivering, goose bumps all over her bare flesh; she doesn’t know how long she’s been staring at the water but it has long since stopped giving off steam.

She slips in, the corners of her mouth twitching when she feels how lukewarm the water is, and she tells herself this will be the day that she does not slide under the surface and wait until she can no longer hold her breath, the light filtering through the soapy water into her open eyes.

She’s wrong, of course. The pain claws at her ribcage, tears away at her from the inside, but she waits until she’s choking for it before she comes up for air, so eager that water goes up her nose and into her mouth and it feels just like old times.

 _He’s not here anymore,_ she tells herself. _He will never find Kate Andrews. He can’t find her._

The problem is, it isn’t Kate Andrews she’s worried about.

+

Gladys stops by the boardinghouse some nights, and Kate is always glad to see her. Sometimes Betty grows cagey and taciturn, thumbing the rim of her glass over and over like a sore she can’t stop picking at until it’s red and raw. Sometimes, it is hard to be around her.

“I don’t understand you, Betty McRae,” she’ll tell Betty, whose mouth will twist into something between a smirk and a grimace.

“That makes two of us.” Betty swirls her glass and takes a sip and hisses as it hurts on the way down. Her eyes are shadows, though the room is bright, and the quirk of her mouth indicates irony, perhaps—or scorn, though Kate cannot tell who it’s meant for.

Betty’s such a mystery, in spite of her brave front; Kate had meant it, she truly does not understand her. She’s never imagined that someone could be so powerfully themselves, for good or ill—Betty has created herself. Built herself from the foundations of her bones, weaving together her thoughts and opinions and wry smiles and low laughter and somehow made someone out of nothing, or everything, and she’s done it on her own. Who she is might be far from perfect—reckless and loud and careless with her feelings—but all of it is hers.

Kate thinks of building herself and she thinks of her father, with a face like a rocky, sea-beaten shore, turning a fistful of clay over in his hands, murmuring: _remember your father, Marion, remember your father._

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kate replies. “I think you know exactly who you are.” _And whether you’re happy with that, well—that’s only for you to know._

Betty laughs like she can’t help it—her voice is broken, slightly, over a shattered glass edge. “Looks like the princess has arrived,” she finally says, tilting up her chin to indicate the doorway where Gladys stands, no longer uncertain after all these visits but still waiting to be let in.

Kate frowns—“Don’t call her that, Betty, you know Gladys is all right.”

“We’ll see,” says Betty, but she’s smiling; “I’ll get the records out.”

Kate goes to greet Gladys, whose eyes light up when she sees her, and when Billie Holiday’s voice strains out of the old speakers, Kate holds out her hand for Gladys to dance and wonders, secretly, whether that is Billie’s real name; whether she too, changed it; what she may have been running from.

+

On her knees, some nights, she will clasp her hands and close her eyes and press her forehead to her knuckles and she will talk to God.

It’s strange the first time, trying to talk to Him without using her father’s words. She struggles, finds her thoughts slipping away like water through her clasped fingers— _like water down the back of her throat, harsh and suffocating_ —and then anger builds inside her, dark and evocative and _powerful_. Her father does not own her any longer. He cannot control who she is, what she believes, how she believes it.

Her voice is soft at first, though her hands are white-knuckled and so tense that they shake. She is not sure what she’s saying but that’s all right, all that matters is that she’s saying it and it isn’t her father looking over her shoulder and pulling her head back by the hair so the smooth line of her throat is exposed as he says, his voice a deep low growl like that of a wild animal: _speak, girl, do as you’ve been told._

“I don’t think we’ve ever truly spoken before,” she says, because they haven’t. The God her father knows is not the one she feels around her, in the pulse of blood in her veins, thrumming beneath the boundaries of her skin.

She can feel her father’s eyes watching her as she slips ever out of his grasp. _So this is what you did not want me to know, Father,_ she thinks, and she smiles with her teeth.

+

In her heart, she had expected him to find her. The sight of him sends a lance of pain through her entire body anyway, like lightning; it courses through her eyes, across her heart, and out through the soles of her feet. She wonders whether they’ll be blackened, when she looks at them—dark and sullied as the sins her father so accuses her of indulging.

But— _your mother is sick_ , he says, and she’s a little girl again with flowers in her braids, her mother whispering _I love you so much, my darling_ and tucking her hair behind her ears. Kate— _Marion_ —touches the tips of her fingers to her face, recalling bruises that once bloomed there; the scars on her back itch and ache and she is suddenly so tired, so exhausted by running. Of course he had found her. She’d been foolish to ever think otherwise—to think that she could have escaped him.

That night, back in the house she had grown up in, her father’s influence like a cancer all around her, she will strip off all her clothes, stand naked in the center of her bedroom, washed in moonlight. She won’t draw the bath, cannot face it.

Her fingernails will claw at the edges of the scars on her back, counting them, _one two three four five six_ , is that one more or less than yesterday? Her ears are ringing again, so loudly, as if she’d never left—as if her father is screaming into her ears, louder and louder, to drown out anything she might dare to think for herself.

She will think of Betty and then regret it, her hands tightening into fists at her sides, her skin crawling. _(The gentle touch of Betty’s lips against the palm of her hand, the warmth of Betty’s shoulders as she kneads her fingers into the bruises there, drawing out the pain like poison from a wound.)_ Her throat closes, suffocates her, but it feels more like grief than revulsion—more like regret than fear.

Sometimes, the only way forwards is backwards.

_Remember your Father, Marion._

She whispers into the silence. “Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name….”


End file.
